A Collaborative UAV Routing Algorithm for Time Sensitive Surveillance Tasks

Surveillance and monitoring of an area are fundamental to a variety of missions, especially in the military field, where quadrotor UAV swarms can be used for area reconnaissance to build awareness of the environment and targets of interest. Aiming at the problem of surveillance and monitoring of a given area, this paper proposes a distributed cooperative vehicle routing algorithm for multi-quadrotor UAV swarms called MUCS-BS. In order to reduce the complexity of the algorithm, we use sweep search to search the area with a "square wave signal" path. In this algorithm, each UAV covers a segment of the "square wave signal" path in such a way that the surveillance time can be minimized.